


Fortunate Son

by KhamanV



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Endgame, Gen, One Shot, Proceed with caution, Therapy, Tumblr Prompt, also discussion of the effects of child abuse, character vignette, highlight that one DISCUSSION OF CHILD ABUSE but no physical abuse shown, some moderate endgame spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 17:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18696463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KhamanV/pseuds/KhamanV
Summary: In the aftermath of a lost war, many of the surviving Avengers went in different ways to rediscover themselves, to heal, or to try to do something to help.Bruce Banner's journey, necessarily, had to be a little different. More complicated. And with a lot to unpack.This is one possible take on some of that journey.





	Fortunate Son

**Author's Note:**

> This is a during/post ENDGAME fic and contains moderate, not severe spoilers for the film. They concern the character of Bruce Banner, and contain themes of emotional childhood abuse that are not otherwise shown. The aftermath and recover, however, are discussed.

**Fortunate Son**

. . .

During Bruce’s early years of fighting to find ways of managing his, as he called it then, _condition_ , he probably test-ran over a hundred different techniques of anger management before settling on social exile and hoping for the best. Somewhere in a rented storage container was a box of handwritten journals - moleskine professional, old habits would never die - that delineated the pros and cons of each experiment in painstaking detail, plus footnotes for an amateur psych paper he would probably never actually write that contained further suggestions about each of these techniques that might help people that were not, specifically, _him_.

Medication got the shortest shrift in these journals, although they were referenced down to chemical notation and cross-checked with various reams of FDA filings, and in just about every single case, while he enthusiastically added details about many of these drugs for general civilian use, he never took a single pill.

Science be damned, thought Bruce over a decade ago, you’re not gonna throw a bottle of Zoloft at the big guy and get a happy result. _Others_ should, if that’s what they and their therapists think are going to work best for a person’s brain chemistry, but gamma radiation, as much as he could stuff a dosimeter up his butt and see precisely how much roentgen he could fart at any given second, made handling the _condition_ a whole other ballgame.

Bruce didn’t actually fart radiation, of course. Something about the way the mutation, as it were, had developed within his body ensured that all dangerous gamma emanations had been internalized and absorbed and - well, it was boring, anyway, and about forty journals on _that_ topic were locked up in the same storage container as everything else, and honestly, speaking as a scientist, radiation and matter degradation and even time was already so weird at the subatomic level that the existence of wizards didn’t really faze him.

So drugs had been out. He at least gave beta blockers a shot, and that had been like throwing a tic tac at the shark from Jaws. That left him with various mental techniques. Meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, sleep hypnosis. He avoided things like drum circles and ‘shamanistic vision journeys,’ because 90% of them were operated by vegan white guys named Cody and had about all the deep spiritual weight as a kale shake, and Bruce knew faking his way through a cultural experience was a: not going to help him b: amounted to what he felt was a dick move.

So the idea of going back to the beginning with all of this, some crunchy granola sit-down with his inner self, _really_ knuckling down for some me time with his other me after the big guy let it be known he was going to sit things out until some undefined change happened, wasn’t his first choice. It became his last choice, though, because Earth’s remaining therapists were overloaded and despairing, and unfortunately, the only person left who really knew Bruce was Bruce himself.

At least he had part of a plan.

. . .

Bruce stood on the dingy scrap of carpet sitting in front of the door of the Bleecker Street mansion, not sure if he was supposed to use the knocker, or ring what he thought was a doorbell, or use his inner thoughts to jingle for a spiritual butler, or what. He settled for slumping awkwardly, glancing up and down at streets that felt too empty, too cold for what had once been a bustling bohemian neighborhood, one of New York’s many beating hearts. It gave him a shiver, knowing how, knowing why, knowing what he’d done and been unable to do to stop it.

There were a few people on the streets. No one looked at him. The final blow had been only a few weeks ago, and most had no idea that the man that had done this to them, to everyone and everything, was gone. That it was over, irrevocably.

Bruce had first chosen social exile and hoping for the best, when nothing else had worked. Now all the world was curled up in their own little balls of hurt, exiled within themselves, distant, coping, failing. He hoped they would come back together sometime. He hadn’t realized how lonely his choice was, until it really was too late. He inhaled, wondering if he was making a mistake, when the door of the mansion creaked open behind him.

He turned back to see the face of Strange’s friend and ally, that other sorcerer named Wong. “Uh, hi.”

Wong looked back at him, his face cool and unreadable. “You here to help fix the roof you broke?”

Bruce’s jaw dropped, just half an inch, as the rest of his face went slack. He had a sudden memory of trying and failing to build a treehouse, a mailbox, the hammer fumbling in his child’s hand and slamming into his thumb. “I’m… I’m not…”

Wong’s face broke into a small smile. “I’m kidding, Dr. Banner. We enchanted it back into shape last week. Come in. The right way, this time,” he said, and he pulled the door open for Bruce to follow him.

. . .

“I wish everything could be fixed that easily.” Bruce couldn’t stop staring at the perfect roof high above him, the stairs that looked like they’d never been broken. He couldn’t stop sounding forlorn, either.

“Do you, though? If everything can be fixed with a snap, what do we learn from the experience?” Wong swept back into the room, placing a wooden tray on the table. The smell of tea reached Bruce. Apple cinnamon, in the little bag. The best kind of tea when you’re eight years old and having a bad day and want to feel like a bigger kid. “Pain matters.” He shrugged. “Too much pain, and it’s hard to stop feeling it every day, though. Every day.”

Bruce glanced at Wong, then wandered over to take some tea. “Enchanted mugs?” He wasn’t serious. He didn’t want to get too serious, it was an obvious change of subject.

Wong chuckled. “Home Goods. Two dollars a piece during the clearance sales. I get the ugliest ones I can find. They make me smile.”

True to Wong’s word, Bruce’s mug was in the shape of a badly painted porcelain chicken. The tea, however, was hot and delicious, mixed with some honey that tasted fresher than most, somehow, and lively. He saluted Wong with it.

“So, Dr. Banner-“

“Bruce. Please.”

“Hmm.” Wong nodded as he pulled out a chair, sitting in it. “Bruce. What can the New York Sanctum do for you?” He watched Bruce sit across from him, that vague smile still playing on his face. “We only charge $1.99 for the first ten minutes of consultation.”

Bruce started laughing. “Do you get a lot of that? The phone psychic stuff?”

Wong shook his head, also laughing, if quietly. “I _have_ found a lost pet or two, for children.” He inclined his head towards Bruce. “No magic involved. Just put an old toy out, or a shirt that smells like you. Works most times.”

“Huh.” Bruce took a sip and set the mug down. “I… kinda need a recommendation, I guess I’d say.”

“Mm?”

Bruce waggled his hand, palm down, trying and, he assumed, failing to get across the duality of spirit thing he was dealing with. “I’ve gotta take some time. The, uh, other guy, the hulk… he’s taken some things kind of hard, and I don’t know how to talk to him, exactly, so…”

Wong watched him, with that same quiet, studious look in his eyes.

Bruce immediately felt exposed, like he was coming off like an idiot. “Do I make any sense?”

“Doctor. Bruce.” Wong glanced up at the ceiling. “Ghosts are real. Multiverses resemble the shattering of a mirror. The body and the soul are tied as one not only by physical forces but spiritual and magical. I’ve watched a man zip back and forth through time like he was burning out the good bits of a VHS tape.” He picked up his tea and sipped it, gracefully. “You would have to _work_ to throw me.”

“Um.”

“Please continue with your request.”

“I… need some help with a meditative therapy experiment.”

Now Wong was staring at him. “Yoga is on Thursdays,” he deadpanned.

“No! No!” Visions of himself _becoming_ Cody the nightmare man, slammed through Bruce’s mind. “I’m so sorry! Not what I meant! I’m not-“

“You are oddly easy to unsettle, Bruce.” Wong’s face broke into a grin. “I like it.”

Bruce froze with a gurgle in his throat. He recovered a few seconds later. “I need a place I can’t break too easily, and I don’t really want to be in a warehouse or a SHIELD bunker, I think they’d make _him_ uncomfortable, and I guess I understand that. Someplace calmer, you know, to get into some deep mind stuff.”

“To chill,” said Wong. He leaned back in his seat, one hand cupped under the bottom of a mug painted with a horrifically bad watercolor rendition of a Cheshire Cat.

Bruce blinked. “Yeah. Like a retreat, but maybe with, I don’t know, like a magical ward on it in case I have a, well… tantrum, as we sort some stuff out.”

“Hm. Getting down with the oneness of things.” Wong relaxed into a full slouch in the seat, thinking. “Yes. California. We maintain a pocket there, on the edge of a vineyard some allies of ours have maintained for a long time. Very monkish. The money from the wine goes to charities, of course. All very traditional. I can write an introduction and a recommendation, and they’ll let you have some space to yourself. It should be very safe. Spiritually and physically.”

“The… other guy can be pretty enthusiastic.”

Wong didn’t look at him, nor react to the doubt in Bruce’s voice. “The Ancient One locked a primal there once, I’m told. Rampaged for half a century until her spells broke it down into nothing. The flowers along the boundaries of the planar space remain beautiful, the emblem of perfect serenity.”

“A primal?”

“A ravenous thing of the dark, a leftover from chthonic times. Eternally in a poor mood and had no taste for the splendor of its surroundings. I think your other self will be fine, Bruce. Would you like a portal when you’re ready to travel, or will you take a bus?”

“Uh…”

. . .

Bruce took the portal.

. . .

The first day was spent staggering around in awe, taking it all in. He spent a good hour or two gawking around the one-room hermit’s dwelling he’d been permitted, a space out of time yet feeling forever springlike and comfortable, with the soft scents of herbs in fresh wooden boxes wafting into the room. Beyond the stone hut was a large and empty field, the epitome of peace. Its green carpet didn’t roll into the vineyards that thrived just down the hills, or connect with the nearby ‘monastery.’ It was contained into a self-sufficient biosphere that defied the normal conventions of physics. Walking through the shimmering barrier didn’t halt him, but it did circulate him around to the other side of the space.

A little pocket world, just as Wong said. With no trace of whatever grand evil had once been imprisoned here.

At the toll of certain bells, one of the monks would come to the edge of the sphere and share with him the hour’s meal. He didn’t talk, and though he looked like a Benedictine monk, he was also intangibly yet clearly _not_. He might not have even been human, Bruce realized. The monk was squat and round, a jolly figure in earthen browns and yellows, with a tonsured dome stuck onto the invisible swivel of his neck. He smiled and he laughed and he gave an almost palpable aura of warmth, but he never made an actual sound.

So Bruce dealt with all that gentle weirdness until he passed out for the night.

The next day, he settled himself in the field and got to work.

. . .

Unlike many of his other contemporaries, Bruce Banner never dismissed the arts out of hand. Nor their roots. He wasn’t a scholar of these things, but he’d made sure to understand at least the basics of philosophy and even things often dismissed as esoteric alchemy, because all of these were the roots of what was considered by the scholastic elites as making up today’s higher thought. His general Latin was rustier than a Jersey junkyard in a wet month, but he’d read the classics one way or another. It was Cicero that floated to the top of his mind, back in those days he filled journals with frantic plans and methods to deal with the _condition_. Cicero, who he’d toyed with and then eventually set aside, and now pulled out to shine a renewed mental light. Cicero, who made a study of the mind.

The method of loci had been one of his philosophical babies, at least in the surviving texts.

The memory palace.

In a way, most people had one. A space where most of their memories gathered for the mind to flit between, some sort of general sense of ‘there’ when rustling around trying to remember where their car keys were. The art of memory was about cultivating the space, forming it into something ‘firmer,’ as much as snapping neurons and flitting energy created anything solid, and using to recall things with precision.

The other guy had started talking more, on Sakaar. Bruce’s memories of it were faded, very much as if they belonged to someone else. His brain held them, but they were not part of his self. His self was split, and the two of them had never really talked, not in the way he supposed they needed.

Mostly they yelled at each other, felt anger, felt hate and dismay and betrayal. Feelings. Never thoughts. Never words.

Under it, he suspected he knew why he _really_ chose exile, rather than looking closer at the way their emotions overtook any chance of conversation. He hadn’t wanted to do the hard work, not then, not when things felt so _current_. That every emotion was like a root canal, that the anger was ever-present, that the Hulk didn’t thrive on anger, exactly, but was uncaged by it, pressing under the skin.

But that anger hadn’t saved the world, much less their friends.

Bruce sat in the middle of an empty field, looking up at that blue sky, and knew exactly what form this memory palace - a neutral ground for the two of them to _talk_ \- was going to take.

. . .

_Home_ wasn’t a familiar concept to Bruce. It never had been. Exile was the natural emotional state of Bruce Banner, and he avoided the facts of that as carefully as a Russian nuclear scientist might have avoided admitting that Chernobyl had hidden its massive dangers under years and layers of professional obfuscation.

Like that hypothetical scientist, the flaws had come to roost.

Home, the physical state, was a ranch-styled mass produced structure on the outskirts of Los Alamos, where Dr. Brian Banner worked at the nuclear facility, and came home to drive away his wife, a mother who Bruce didn’t remember, and loom, horrifying and huge, like a demon’s shadow, over Bruce.

In the memory palace, the shadows were not there. It was full of light, with the staticky smell of radiation that was ever-present in Bruce’s mind. The laundry was neatly hidden away, there was food in the fridge, and he was a ghost in the kitchen, smelling spilled kool-aid coming from the back yard.

A figure shifted outside, large, large, hulking. The staticky, ozone-like smell grew stronger. People would tell you you couldn’t smell radiation. Not normally, no. But massive amounts, deadly, life-shattering amounts, _that_ left a smell like a thunderstrike. Bruce realized he wasn’t afraid of the Hulk waiting outside. He went to the side door of the kitchen and let the giant green figure in, a slip of thought allowing him change the rules, for Hulk to enter without shattering the too-small frame.

The real horror was waiting for them both in the living room. The sound of the TV reached them, the _Happy Days_ credit jingle looping and warping as Bruce and the Hulk stood, with an odd, matching quiet, in the kitchen.

“Want milk,” said Hulk. “Not real, want anyway.”

Bruce opened the fridge and got the milk. It was in glass bottles, probably an old-timey incongruence, but it didn’t matter. He got one of those big, plastic cups out of a cupboard, neon reddish with the shoddy rims that could cut a lip open, and poured it full of cold milk. He handed it to Hulk without a word, feeling anxious.

“Thank you,” said Hulk. He drank it in gulps. “Why scared?”

“Me?” Bruce realized he wasn’t looking at the giant.

“Me.” The Hulk grunted. “Us.”

Bruce looked up at him, all the way up, seeing that gamma green and wide-faced look. The Hulk was staring at the living room. “Us. Us. Scare all time.”

“Not angry?”

“ _Scared_.”

Bruce frowned, the sort of frown a tenured professor gets when the kid that’s usually asleep in the back of the class hits on something that’s been dodging him since his first journal submission. “You feel scared?”

Hulk stared down at him, nostrils flaring in very real irritation. “You do too. I feel. Always feel.”

Bruce absorbed that, but there was a wall in his thoughts. The point was to get over that wall, or around it, and stop ignoring it, but that was easier said than done. “Let’s go in the living room and take a look.”

Hulk said nothing. He kept staring down at Bruce and didn’t move.

Bruce walked out of the kitchen and looked at the little boy sitting on a ratty, huge square pillow with fringes at each corner, saw the tears on the face that made the image of young Ron Howard look blurry to him, too, saw that ten year old version of himself with a toy dinosaur grabbed in one hand hard enough to whiten the knuckles, and snapped right out of the memory palace.

. . .

There in the field, Bruce was sobbing.

. . .

Bruce brought a new journal with him. The first entry read thus:

_Rough start, but technically it’s progress. No animosity between me and the big guy - neutral ground focused us both on the kid. The kid, which is me, age 10, 1977, having thrown up a happy meal because Brian came home from the lab, drank himself into a frenzy, and had a fit at me. I don’t remember the specific date, but it doesn’t matter. I could pin that year on a dartboard and go at it, and I’d probably be right. The year before, and the year after. I even threw up the day I went to go see Star Wars, because I got home late and Brian was already there and he freaked out that maybe I’d died and how much it would hurt him. He shook me. I remember that one pretty clearly._

_I was put in a care home for a couple years when I was a teen. Probably why I had a few screws put together right. They put me back with Brian later on. Said my Dad was better. I don’t remember perfectly, but I expect that was a lie._

_Apparently this matters to the Hulk. Or to me._

. . .

Day two:

_We’ve established I can’t hear the Happy Days song without having some kind of emotional attack. Hulk smashed the TV, which kept us both in the memory palace for a couple seconds longer, until ten year old me started wailing._

. . .

Day three:

_Okay, we went into the garage instead. Hulk sat on the concrete and played with an old Tonka dumpster truck I used to have, which was kind of nice, actually. He didn’t break it. I found one of those weird old, like, Duplo figures and put it in the back of the bin, so he could drive the character around. Hulk said, “No,” and took the figure back out._

_I asked why._

_“Man not trash.”_

_I told him that’s not what I meant, that the figure couldn’t fit in the driver’s cab._

_“Didn’t even try.” He yelled it at me. “Didn’t even try!” Began to smash the truck into the pavement, kept it away from me when I tried to grab it. He yelled the same thing again until I got the toy away. Then he yells again. “You think we trash!”_

_Snapped out of the memory palace._

_Guess I should think about that for a day or two._

_. . ._

On day six, after a lot of quiet thought, Bruce took the Hulk into the garage again. He found the dump truck toy, and gave it over as Hulk watched him warily. Then he picked up the stubby Duplo figure and tried to push it into the window of the truck, showing Hulk that it couldn’t fit.

Hulk stared at him, almost tearful.

“See?” said Bruce. “I wasn’t trying to make a statement.”

“Still not trying. Not trying. You believe we trash.”

Bruce shook his head, the frustration bubbling up. Three days of thinking over the last encounter, logically expecting that the Hulk would respond to the demonstration. He snapped, another experiment failed. “I don’t know what the hell you want from me!”

Hulk roared back, wordless at first. Then he took the truck and the figure from Bruce’s hands, without breaking them. He tapped the figure at the truck’s cab. “Why you get to pick rules? Why?”

“It’s _my_ memory.”

“ _Ours_!” A foot the size of a concrete block began stomping. “Ours! Ours! Ours!”

“Fine!” Bruce flung his hands in the air. “Fine! Do whatever you want! Break the house, screw it, you big dumb animal! Fuck it, do it, show me what you got!”

The Hulk roared back at him, shaking the toys in Bruce’s face.

Then all Hulk did was change the rules of the dream and memory a little bit, so that the figure could squeeze into the toy truck.

Like how Bruce had let him into the home that first day. All the days after. Hulk had paid attention and understood.

Bruce stared wordlessly as Hulk rattled the toy, the dumb smiling face of the plastic figure judging him from inside the truck’s cab. Judging him for missing the small, simple things.

Judging him for his assumptions.

Bruce turned on his heel and walked out of the garage, walked until he opened his eyes in the green field, pissed off, blurry eyed, and tempted to go back to the stone cell and rip it right the _fuck_ off its moorings, whether he was imbued with Hulk-strength or not.

. . .

Bruce needed time to think, but he also decided it would be unfair to let Hulk stew in silence while he did so, considering. So he continued with the daily sessions inside his own memory, but instead of dealing with the garage or the crying kid in the living room, he took the TV out into the backyard so Hulk could watch vaguely remembered episodes of Sesame Street. Meanwhile, Bruce poked around the house, trying to decide what items provoked what memories, and thought about why, of the two of them, _he_ seemed more inclined to tantrum them all right out of the memory.

He was also unsure who was controlling the rules of the memory palace now. The TV didn’t need a plug, and Hulk had somehow gotten a stuffed rabbit out of his bedroom, the now-oversized toy sitting placidly on his lap while huge knuckles flexed with childlike gentleness between its ears. He remembered that toy. Crying into it some nights. A lot of nights, honestly.

Come to think, it might still be in that storage unit.

. . .

A week later, Bruce found his way to the memory palace and discovered that it was already fully formed and that he wasn’t starting in the kitchen, like he usually did. He was on the front lawn, squinting against the summer sun at a car frozen in mid-turn at the edge of the driveway. He couldn’t see the figure shadowed in the driver’s seat, but knew who it was. He fought the urge to instantly snap out of the palace.

He turned around and saw Hulk sitting on the steps of their home. The rabbit was on his lap.

_Flex-flex_. Knuckles kneaded gently into the head of the toy. “Bad man.”

“He… wasn’t great.”

“Brian. Brian.” Flex, went the fingers. The name was crooned. “Brian hurt Bruce.”

“Yeah.”

“Why.” Hulk looked up from the toy to the car, an old Buick. “Why Bruce hurt?”

Bruce said nothing, until he looked down at his hands and realized his fists were so tight the nails were digging into his palm. He felt it in reality, too, but it didn’t pull him out. “Brian was a messed up guy.”

The look he got said that was far from satisfactory.

“He… look. He worked with nuke stuff a lot. He got some weird ideas. He never… he hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone, but he worked with stuff that made him afraid that if the technology screwed up, people would…” He couldn’t say it.

“Monsters. Monsters.” Hulk rocked back and forth, hugging the toy. For a moment, he looked curiously small. “God. Zil. A. Movies on Saturday. Big monster. Big glow mean big monster.”

Bruce swallowed. “He thought he infected Mom by working at the lab. That I was…”

“Monster.” Hulk whispered to the rabbit in his lap. “We big monster. Grow up mutant monster. He right.”

Bruce shook his head. “No, he wasn’t,” he said, and the words tasted like ozone. “I went into the field to help prove that. The whole reason I studied the same science.”

“YOU LIE!”

Bruce took a step back as the Hulk got up, the rabbit dangling from one hand, and the Hulk was big now, terribly big, big as a mountain. “YOU LIE!” Hulk roared again. “YOU HATE SELF. YOU HATE. YOU HATE.”

Bruce looked around wildly, trying to focus himself on leaving the memory, on snapping out of it before the Hulk stepped towards him with a foot the size of a cruise liner, looking for somewhere to run, but today wasn’t on his rules.

Hulk stepped past him, harmlessly. Then, with the rabbit still clutched in one hand, he _booted_ the Buick and its passenger so goddamn hard it went pixel sized instantly. If the memory palace had been detailed enough to contain the solar system, that sucker was going straight for Jupiter for an audition to become a new mini-moon. Then he turned and looked down at Bruce, the Hulk back to his normal if huge size, and the expression on his face was full of strange empathy. He bent down and hugged Bruce. “I no want be monster anymore.”

“I need to think,” gasped Bruce, strangling not from the gentle contact but from everything he was _feeling_.

. . .

Bruce dealt with the aftermath of that for a while, alone in the hermit’s cell. The journal went unfilled.

. . .

The same jolly, dome-headed monk always brought dinner. Bruce could leave notes with suggestions or things he needed, and he was never treated like a prisoner because he wasn’t one. So when he asked for a big box of junk food with a cheap kid’s toy included, the monk not only brought that, but made sure it was hot and fresh.

He sat in the field, and it was him eating forty grotesquely delicious pieces of dubious deep fried chicken nuggets and a double fry-basket, but it was also Hulk, munching away happily inside the memory palace.

Inside, Hulk sat on one side of the large, ugly, generically 70’s couch. Bruce was on the other end, occasionally taking a fry. Between them was the ten year old boy, still unaware of the two pieces of himself on either side. Young Bruce wasn’t crying today. It was the day he was taken away to be fostered for a while, and that whole concept of being taken outside of the situation seemed useful enough to adult Bruce. Young Bruce felt empty, tired, but also ready. A good place for all three of them to be for this.

“It’s been three weeks, big guy, and we haven’t actually talked much yet.”

“Not ready to listen.” Another nugget went down the hole. “Not want to.”

“I know I haven’t.” That was the key, wasn’t it? When the Hulk bellowed, it was, after all, himself. “You’re not… actually my anger, are you? I mean, scientifically, we always got a lot to unpack about what the gamma change did to us, physically, mentally, blah blah, but that’s not what I’m getting at.”

Hulk went to wipe grease on his pants, stopped, then roughly tried to grab a napkin instead. “Me Hulk,” he said.

“Right. But what does that mean?”

“You think you Bruce, me Hulk. Easy.”

“It’s convenient.” Bruce leaned over to grab a nugget. “You’re a… you’re a scapegoat.”

“ME NO GOAT.” It was loud, but also sarcastic somehow. Hulk didn’t move, letting him take the chicken.

“You know what I mean. I put all this on you. Like… like it’s easier if I just assume you’re all my emotions I don’t want to deal with, right?”

Hulk grunted.

“But like… I started to get some grip on you… on _us_ … when I realized I was angry all the time. That was part of the key, wasn’t it?” He watched the Hulk. “But I also missed it, like, by _that_ much.”

“Missed it.” Ten fries went down at once. Hulk coughed as one of the pointy bits caught at his throat. “Big miss.”

“Because I thought it was a way to control you, if I understood that. But I wasn’t understanding a damn thing right, because I didn’t want to.” Bruce looked at ten year old him. He was a wonky little kid, at that stage where faces got rubbery, trying to grow adult-sized. For a moment, the boy’s face twisted, hiding tears of stress and failing at it. The mouth stretched wide, the eyes went down in a hard squint, and the whole face became blocky and strained. Then Bruce looked up at Hulk’s face, and saw the similarities there. The obvious ones, all along. Not a primal, unchained face, but the hurt face and pressed lips of a child. “I made you into all the stuff I didn’t want to deal with, and told myself it was because you were a monster that I could barely control, and every time you bust out…”

“Tired. Don’t want to bust out. Don’t want to hurt. When Hulk come out, people mad, scared, angry.” Hulk put down a half eaten chicken bit. “Hulk want friend. Be okay. Be told things better.” He looked at Bruce. “Hulk liked scary girl. She no afraid. Didn’t know things. Didn’t know Hulk was supposed to be monster. Liked Hulk for Hulk.”

“You’re not a monster.” Bruce inhaled. “I thought I was the monster all along, big guy. Because I couldn’t control anything that happened around me, and then I couldn’t control anything about myself.”

“Con-trol.”

“But maybe it’s not just about that. About feeling I have to control anything. I wanted to be a scientist, so why do I fight so hard about trying to understand things? Much less myself? Why’s it so hard to sit down and unpack why I feel this way about things?”

“Because hurt. Hurt hurts. No want to feel hurt. Is okay to be. Just maybe not always.”

“God. You’re not stupid, are you? You’re a big kid, because that’s where I froze all that stuff out.” Bruce laughed, staring at the dead TV. “You don’t know a lot of things because hurt kids regress and just feel everything all at once, like all the time. And I did that to you, because _I_ couldn’t deal with it as a damn adult. The gamma changes… that was part of an excuse. It coulda been different right from the start.”

Hulk grunted again, as if telling him to continue.

“What if some well adjusted college kid got juiced the way I did? Someone with their head on straight, who’d gotten therapy when they should have? How’d they turn out?” Bruce laughed, awkward and almost giggling. “Imagine an eight foot tall lawyer with the ability to photo-memorize legal docs and shotput the opposition to the moon, but only if they needed to.”

Hulk said nothing. He reached between his feet, being careful to not jostle his remaining fries, and picked up the bunny plush. He handed it over to Bruce, careful to not bop the silent little boy with it.

Bruce curled his arms around the stuffed bunny, looking elsewhere, thinking. He was silent a long time.

It was Hulk that spoke. “Could change. Still change. Always chance.”

Bruce shook his head. “Can I? Can _we_?”

“Hulk want happy. You want happy. Same thing. Same thing, always same. You hurt, try to hide it, so Hulk hurt all time. But if Bruce want happy and Hulk want happy, then we same, same.” Hulk was looking at him, and his eyes were open and huge, like a little boy’s. “Same all along, no. Same now? Maybe. Try. Not easy, but try.”

“Still a lot to deal with. Maybe check in with a normal - well, kinda normal therapist, too, right?”

Hulk shrugged. “Hulk not want to be fight monster. You want feelings, but scared of all. But both want happy. Don’t use Hulk. Hulk no use Bruce. Same. Be same.”

“I mean…”

“Try.” Hulk reached down to pound on the carpet, enthusiastic. “Try, try! Not be like truck figure! Try!”

Bruce looked stricken, realizing the Hulk had again pulled a mile ahead of him on something. “That’s it, that’s the key? Just make an effort?”

“TRY!” A happy roar, the Hulk knowing he’d gotten through.

“Is it that easy?”

The Hulk sobered. “Never easy. If easy, why we be this so far? Try anyway. Good to try. Fail, too. But feel better.” He reached over to pat the bunny, then Bruce’s head. “Worthy fight, like Thor say. Good fight. Hulk ready for that fight. No more big monster.”

Bruce started laughing, realizing all of a sudden what had really happened. “God, my inner self sat me down for an intervention using my own stupid brain against me. Holy shit. This was all you, wasn’t it? You’re the one that remembered all that dumb stuff about memory palaces. You waited until I got angry and started taking the place over.”

“Bruce. Hulk.” The eyes were looking at him, like he was the idiot. Maybe, Bruce thought, he was right. “Bruce, Hulk, same. Not me. You. Us. Need each other. Think, feel, same person? Try.”

“What’ll we be like?” He paused, realizing, putting it back together. “What’ll I be like after this, if we get somewhere? If I, or you, or us? Wow, normal pronouns are really not up to handling this conversation.”

Hulk shrugged, not invested in the grammar of the situation. “Same. Different. Bruce.”

“Just Bruce Banner.”

Hulk shrugged. “Bruce is Hulk. Hulk is Bruce. No one lose. Me not gone. Me home. _Home_. Want home, want try, want chance. Be smart, be strong. Be you. Me.”

Bruce tried to start laughing again and realized he was crying instead. “Just be our best.”

Hulk nodded enthusiastically as Bruce got it, really finally _got it_ , and that was when Bruce realized the little boy between them was gone.

. . .

The monks packed Bruce off with a bottle of wine that didn’t fit in his large hand so he gave it away almost immediately, but they’d also hooked him up with a monk’s robe in size circus tent, and that he stuck with until he got to the spot where he’d arranged a pickup with Wong. Some sort of spiritual thing in the ether that would send a message when he arrived.

Bruce, now nine foot fuck-off tall and smiling in a pleasant shade of Kermit, waited for Wong to arrive through another portal.

Wong, far from his first rodeo of wild going on in his life, still took a second to collect himself at the sight of a jolly green giant cosplaying a Benedictine. “So, the oneness of stuff worked out rather well for you.”

“Yeah. We’ve still got lots of things to work over, but we had some major breakthroughs.”

Wong nodded. “You would like a trip back to New York?”

“You know.” Bruce let that hold a moment. “I think I’d like to stay in California a while. Maybe go down to New Mexico real quick. Can I ask a huge - _heh_ \- favor and ask if anyone knows someone that can dress a dude my size? Nothing fancy, but I’m gonna scare a Big & Tall store if I don’t work up to it. Get people familiar with me walking around. It’s… well, it’s going to have to be part of the therapy, but I don’t want to spook people immediately, either.”

“I’m sure we can arrange something.” Wong put his hands together. “You’re also still on the Stark Industries payroll, aren’t you? And the Avengers.”

“I haven’t… I haven’t wanted to impose.” Bruce shrugged, the expression of sheepishness looking outsized and rubbery on the broad face.

“They are still friends. They would be happy to help as well.” Wong looked up at him. “It is a measure of friendship that one will help when things are good, as well as when they are difficult. I appreciate that you came to us because you wanted to begin neutral, Bruce, but you are also not alone.”

Bruce nodded and looked away, grinning with a slight hangdog expression deepening the broad features. “Boy, everyone’s just handing me my own ass, lately. Emotionally.”

Wong cleared his throat. “Not my precise intent. We are all survivors, Bruce. The least we can do is be there for each other.”

“It’s true. It really is.” Bruce sighed. “It’s not exile this time, though. I just want some time to… remember how to live. Feel like a person. You know?”

Wong smiled up at him. “I understand, Bruce. When you are ready, the world will be here for you, I think.” He gestured at the robe. “But yes. Brown is not your color.”

“Nah.”

“You look like a Muppet dressed like a fudge brownie.”

Bruce started laughing, the sound of it ringing happily. “I really, really do.”

“You will be all right out here,” said Wong, and it wasn’t a question.

“Yeah. I think I finally will,” said Bruce, and he smiled like the big kid at heart he could be, all over again, and also for the first time.

_~ Fin_

_. . ._

_It ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one - Creedence Clearwater Revival_

5/3/19 - all rights to Marvel

**Author's Note:**

> Brian Banner and his abusive nature towards his son and his wife are a matter of some various canon. The Ang Lee film touched broadly on those themes, I'm told, but in full confession, I've never seen it. The comics do discuss Brian's fear and turmoil, and the character was fully introduced in '85 as a major factor on Bruce's mental health.
> 
> also this got way deeper than I meant to go for a fun tumblr Endgame prompt, but at least we stuck the happy ending.


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